Verbing the adjectivised abstraction

I’ve been reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: Fall of a Dynasty about the Indian Rebellion of 1857 with great interest. The complacent reports of the British commanders as they went about destroying the last remnants of independent Indian power are startlingly reminiscent of the “Good News from Iraq” we got so much of in 2003, and which was briefly revived during the now collapsing surge/awakening/truce. More generally, Dalrymple gives an evocative account of the Mughal court on the eve of destruction.

But I was, perhaps unfairly, amused by Dalrymple’s introduction where he extols the merits of archival research, as against the kind of “subaltern history” that pads out existing secondary sources with large dollops of theory to produce more or less interchangeable articles with titles of the general form “Othering the Imagined Construct” (feel free to permute the parts of speech to derive your own). I’ll leave it to others to decide whether this is better or worse than the old standby “Nonsensical Phrase Drawn From Primary Source: Random Word, Random Word, and the Actual Topic of this Book, or the generic economic article of the form “Hot Current Idea, Established Field and Putative Application”.

Philip Adams had him on Late Night Live a while back talking about this book. Unfortunately the podcast is no longer available but if they repeat it on Classic LNL on Friay or when they put their archives online you’ll be able to listen to it. If I’m not mixing it up with another interview he talked about the amazingly tolerant form of Islam that existed under the Moghuls in India. It is something that even many people relatively knowledgable about Islam don’t know about and alot of ignorant RWDB would simply not believe is possible. The British fitted right into this when they first arrived. They inter married and adopted many local habits and customs but that all ended with the rise fundamentalist Christianity back in Britian. In a way that Fundamentalist Christianity, which was based on the idea that God gave them the Empire to civilise the world, echoes American Exceptionalism today. The single most interesting thing he mentioned was that Wahabism (the very strict form of Islam Bin Laden and Saudi Arabia follow) was a reaction against this Christian Fundamentalism. As they say history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.

No, fundamentalist Christianity simply didn’t take in Britain that way. What stopped the cultural merger was the arrival of significant numbers of white women, plus the effects of the mutiny on attitudes – the idea that separation in cantonments and at other levels was both necessary and right.

Any possibility of long-term peaceful co-existence between Indians and the English was probably ended by the Bengali famine of 1770 which was deliberately exacerbated by the British East India Company to profit off grain speculation.